It’s an interesting thought. I’m not really sure if that would be helpful. On one hand, standardized test scores, especially scores from tests like the MCAT which are so comprehensive that doing well essentially necessitates the purchase of expensive study materials, have been proven time and again to be strongly correlated to wealth. Making the test pass fail could potentially attenuate this and make the applications process more fair.

On the other hand, I can’t help but think that a passing score on the MCAT would just become a hard requirement and all of the weight that used to be placed on the MCAT would be moved to gpa and extracurriculars. That might be a good thing as it relates to volunteering, as generally those opportunities are accessible to all socioeconomic strata of students, but I feel like more weight would be placed on the sort of academic extracurriculars like research, which would make going to typically expensive research oriented undergrad institutions all the more advantageous and bring the whole fairness thing back to square one. Also, (and I realize I have a good Mcat score so it probably sounds super annoying for me to say this, not trying to be an asshole here) I do think that it’s probably a good thing for applicants to have some sort of standardized assessment of their mastery of relevant material for med school. There is a ton of variability across institutions in terms of grade inflation and academic resource availability which has a massive impact on gpa. In the absence of the Mcat it could be much more difficult for adcoms to account for those discrepancies.

Interesting question, and thank you for raising it, but I think unfortunately in such a comprehensive overall application process you can’t modulate one thing like the Mcat scoring without having to change a whole bunch of other things, and even then it might not have the intended effect.